Ojai Music Festival, 80 Years
Give
BUY

Tag: interviews

  • Jeremy Denk on the 2014 Ojai Music Festival

    “On the advice of my lawyer, I’m not going to tell you what I’ve planned for 2014,” joked Ojai Music Festival 2014 Music Director Jeremy Denk at the Sunrise Breakfast. The joke was half-serious. Denk, in conversation with Performance Today’s Fred Child, revealed a few things over the course of a discussion that ranged from Denk’s 2001 residency on Performance Today – an hour every morning for a week of interviewing and performing – to why Denk double-majored in chemistry and music performance at Oberlin.

    Child and Denk spoke in front of a crowd of donors at the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa after OMF artistic director Tom Morris chatted a little about the status of sales for this year and for next – about 700 tickets had been sold for 2013 by the fourth day of this year’s festival – and Denk, who performed at the Festival with eighth blackbird in 2009, said that he was nervous the first time he was here and didn’t get to fully appreciate the atmosphere. But on Thursday night, as he listened to Marc-André Hamelin play the Concord Sonata, he started settling into the beauty of nature and thinking about the ways nature “and all its colors” could play out in the programming for 2014.

    When an audience member asked Denk if Ojai 2014 would be seeing any “Denkian words” on stage during his festival, he said, “That’s a probability,” and he also hinted that he might be inviting violinist Stefan Jackiw. “I feel confident in saying someone from Brooklyn, or someone who has lived in Brooklyn, will be in the festival,” he added, in response to an audience question about the new music scene centered in Brooklyn

    Denk said he feels a little bit like “a fuddy-duddy” in comparison to some of the younger musicians experimenting with music in New York. But, he added, “I feel like Ojai has a sort of party atmosphere that should not be lost in the music-making.” The audience clapped and laughed

    An audience member asked, “Are you thinking about doing some composing?” and Denk responded, “Please! No.” He’s working on another major piece for The New Yorker, he said, and he added, “There’s that practicing the piano thing to do, which does take some hours every day.”

    -Suzi Steffen

  • Chatting with Marc-André Hamelin

    A few weeks ago we collected questions to ask Marc-André Hamelin. He’s just gotten back to us, answering questions about working with Leif Ove Andsnes, favorite pianists, and desert islands. Here’s what he said:

     

    When you and Leif Ove Andsnes perform works for four hands, how do you decide who plays which part?

    It’s only happened for two pieces so far, so there’s no great tradition yet! If one of us expresses a preference, the other respects it; that’s all there really is to it. Incidentally, we’ve only played 2-piano pieces so far — nothing on just one piano.

     

    How do you decide the balance between solo, chamber, and orchestral appearances? Do you have a preference? What are the attractions of each?

    It all depends on what concert offers come my way. I tend to take all I can, whether solo, chamber or orchestral, provided my schedule doesn’t get overcrowded; beyond a certain number of concerts, the quality of what I do is bound to start to suffer.

     

    You have played pretty much everything…is there anything left, or will you turn to composition full-time?

    I find this question extremely amusing! If one could play literally everything ever written for the piano, it would take at least twenty lifetimes! It’s not generally appreciated just how much there really is. True, a lot of it is forgettable or out of fashion, but there’s still many good things out there waiting to be heard.

    As far as composition, it’s a necessary thing for me, and I enjoy it tremendously, but my concert activity will always be my main priority.

     

    Desert island music question! What are the five recordings you’d want if you were actually stranded on an island? (box sets don’t count).

    The more CDs and LPs you have (and yes, I still collect LPs) the more it would be impossible to make a choice! Also, I’d be afraid that if I took a small number of records to a desert island, I’d get sick of them, and that would be unfortunate…

     

    Do you have any favorite pianists among the legendary figures of the past (or present)?  Any favorite recordings or concert experiences?

    When I was little, my father played a lot of the Golden Age pianists’ recordings — those were his favorites by far, so naturally I got to know and love them very much. I liked a lot of them — hard to pick one. Ignaz Friedman and Josef Hofmann, perhaps. As far as now, people like Freire, Lupu, Uchida, Ax, Andsnes and Zimerman…well, the world would be much poorer without them.

    Two of the concerts that particularly affected me (in a positive way!) were Shura Cherkassky’s two Montréal appearances back in the late 70s, when I was an impressionable youth.

     

    If you weren’t playing piano, you’d be….

    A master of ‘air chess’!  No, seriously…I have a certain aptitude for languages (even though I only speak two) so maybe a linguist?

     

    Thanks to everyone who sent in their questions, and a big thank you to Marc-André – we can’t wait to see you in June! If you’re interested in seeing Marc-André Hamelin perform at the 65th Ojai Music Festival, click here for a program schedule.